The Doorway Home

I began this journey in sadness, mourning the loss of my cat companion of ten years, a little black cat named Sabina.  Sabina was not an easy cat.  She didn’t like to be picked up, she swiped at family members as they walked by, and preferred to be outdoors.  Like many cats, she was devoid of humor – or else her humor was too dark to be appreciated by most.  But she and I understood one another, and she would sit by me when I worked or meditated.  When I walked the dog she would walk with us. She might run ahead a little or drop behind, or dodge into the bushes when a car or a person came by, but she stayed with us.  In all three of the houses we shared, she met me when I came home and accompanied me from my car to the front door.  Sometimes she came in.  She liked her space. 

So I was back in grief.  And while it was a different grief than the loss of my husband, it fingered the same notes.  There is something immediate about the loss of an animal friend; the full impact of it hits right away.  A human loved one seems to leave more gradually, the psyche only allowing itself to experience parts of the loss at a time until one day it all adds up and you realize they’re never, ever coming back.  Sabina’s death, abrupt and unexpected and still unexplained, landed me right in the center of my most abandoned self without preamble or the chance to cushion the fall. 

I spent a few days hoping to scramble out of this terrible place before I got too badly burned.  As I often do, I focused on the bright side of pain hoping I wouldn’t have to see the dark.  But that never lasts for long.  I pretty quickly resigned myself to the fact I was heading someplace hard.  I had no choice but to be led by the tender nose of my sorrow into the place I most avoid. 

This is the place of no-self, the mother of all soul loss.  It is a place without a fix.  No coach-induced modification of behavior, thought or diet will get me out of having to sit here, at some point, and feel the cumulative effect of all the times I have abandoned myself.  I can put it off, and sometimes it seems to disappear like a cat into the shadows, but it tracks me wherever I go.  In it is the truth that the only thing missing from my life has been me.  If I can sit unprotesting in this place, acknowledging the consequences of that truth, I have found the doorway home. 

 

This morning I was called back to life by the sight of a great blue heron landing on the roof of the house across the creek.  Its blue-gray coloring on a foggy morning mimicked the mists of the liminal state through which I’d been traveling.  It stood, elegant and certain, belonging first to the community of itself, and so very much a part of the world.  I went outside in my stocking feet to see it more closely, and we stood together in stillness. 

At the end of this journey I am left with the certainty that I am no longer willing to live half a life.  I feel as though I’ve been sitting in a waiting room not quite concentrating on magazines, glancing at the pictures and looking expectantly at the door where my next appointment will be.  It seemed this morning as though the heron opened that door and beckoned me in, and perhaps I only thought I saw a little black cat dart between its legs into whatever lay beyond. 

With love,

Mia

Medicine Dream

River-Rebirth by Sandra Mikus

I went to bed last night with the makings of a cold – a sore throat and a defeated achiness that made everything seem heavy and hard.  It felt like the perfect expression of where my grief has led me of late, moist and acidic, and not a place to linger.  As I dropped into sleep, I asked my dreams for help.

I dreamt I was in a dry South Asian country, and that an unwanted authority had taken over.  Suddenly we had no autonomy, and had to follow senseless rules.  Our lives were not our own.  I was walking someplace I was not permitted to be, and I saw a plant that was dying.  I knew the laws dictated I must leave it alone to rot, but I couldn’t.  I didn’t feel courage or fear; it was just not in my nature to let it die. 

The plant was a potted palm, and there was decay in one of the stems.  I took hold of it, and the top separated from the stem, leaving behind a glistening, bright green stump. The part I had in my hand separated again into the leafy top and a connecting piece, both dripping the same verdant juice.   I was immediately aware that all three pieces were viable new growth.  The stump in the soil would sprout new stems, and the leafy top would easily root.  The connecting piece was interesting: androgynous, undefined, and full of potential; you could plant it up or down and it would root or leaf depending on what orientation you chose. 

Frightened and controlling parts of self may want us to walk past our grieving, leaving it to rot in septic puddles of neglect.  But grief properly tended yields abundance and renewal.  We become more than what we were.  Today my body feels raw, like the glistening vulnerability of the place on the stem that let go, but I no longer feel like a conquered nation, powerless in my own land.  I have reclaimed my state, and possibilities abound.

My mother taught me how to listen to my dreams.  We would sit at the kitchen table and she would tell me where she’d been at night, and because I was a child, all I had to do was listen.  She wasn’t asking me to interpret them for her, just be a witness, an anchor in the waking world. 

Dreams, like grief, are meant to be shared. It is the means by which we irrigate our lives from the infinite pool we find when we follow the river in the marrow of our bones.  It is not enough to incubate and cradle our own dreams.  If they are to learn to walk in this world, they must be heard by another. 

Thank you, always, for listening. 

Letting Go

I took off my wedding ring Wednesday night.  It began as an experiment; I wanted to see what it would feel like.  And then I found myself reluctant to put it back on.  The skin where it had been was pink, like the new skin you find when you pick a scab.  For a day I wore the ring around my neck, but I can’t sleep with jewelry on so I took the necklace off that night.  The next day I found Michael’s ring and I placed both our rings on an altar, mine nestled inside his.

This morning I panicked and tried putting the ring back.  It slipped right on, comfortably resuming it’s place in the dent on my finger.  When I tried to slide it off, it stuck, like a reluctant dog who’s been asked to vacate the ease of a soft armchair. That made me feel even more panicky, so I worked it off again and sat with both rings in my hand.           

Michael and I knew that we are old, old friends, and holding those rings I saw what they symbolized pales in comparison to what we are and always will be to one another.  As I let go of the roles the rings represented – roles in which we were never entirely comfortable – what streamed in were all the lifetimes we’d shared, all that we’ve ever been to each other.  We’d been everything, explored every possibility, and in every possible configuration.  And throughout it all was the thread of his patience with me.

All of that became part of me again when I released us from the cramped space of Michael and Mia, husband and wife. Michael’s essence is part of everything I  have built in this life, the way water is part of a tree.  As I sat there with our rings in my palm, I allowed my parched essence to again draw him through my deepest roots giving me flexibility, heart, and strength.

A lifetime together is so short, like a stolen kiss as you dance a reel, a flash of recognition before the flow of the dance takes you away to the next thing.  The dance never stops, and sometimes you get lucky enough to share a moment with a beloved who has been with you since the beginning of time, someone who never really leaves you, and will always be back.  The memory of that kiss makes you smile for aeons, and the promise of its return is a secret pleasure that distracts you as you try to pay attention to other things that should seem important and matter not at all.

Michael’s birthday is next week.  He would have been 61.  What better gift than to give him back his immensity, to let him expand beyond the agreement that those rings symbolized. I know some part of him never goes far, that wherever he dances next there will be a smile on his lips. I love him enough to let him go, even though the human woman I am aches to feel his arms around me, to smell him one more time. 

Happy Birthday, sweetie.  Love always. 

When we were impossibly young

And with Michael's second grandchild, Leo Michael Breyman

The Divine Divorce

The night of the full super moon I dreamed it was my birthday.  I was being taken to a fancy hotel room to celebrate by a big and powerful man.  He and I were not lovers, but I was craving intimacy with him.  He kept telling me what a nice room it was, though I found it to be very ordinary and dull.  At just the moment we were going to connect in some way, I saw him do something so familiar and sad it made my teeth ache: I saw him decide to disappoint me.  I could see that he hated himself for it, and I could also see that he thought he was doing me a favor, saving me from further grief by showing me that he was utterly incapable of love.  Just before I woke up I was wondering, “Why can’t I just leave?” 

It wasn’t that he didn’t love me.  He was just broken.  Not wounded, not some injured and vulnerable being waiting for my ministrations to bring him back to life.  It was not about my being good enough, beautiful enough, woman enough, strong enough, healer enough.  He just didn’t have the parts to put back together.  Something was missing and something would always be missing.

Upon waking I realized, this relationship doesn’t work.  It never has.  It never will.  My inner masculine is a bum. 

All the years of rage and disappointment, all the struggle and effort to make him something other than what he was – what I knew he was because I created him – all that waste and shame led to this simple realization.  What if I just let it be true?  What if I listen, finally listen to the truth that’s been playing itself out over and over my whole life? 

It has taken me a few days to digest this, to let my tired and toughened tissues absorb the bitter medicine of this truth.  The masculine I have built in myself based on the parts I had available to me is never going to provide for me, make me happy, or keep me safe.  And unlike a real human being, he is incapable of change, a static construct based on subterranean beliefs about myself, judgments that I am not worthy of love or forgiveness.  He is a cage built by my ego to keep me hating myself and out of love with life.  I have always had the key. 

            So at this solstice time of year when the sun is strong and I think I am supposed to be celebrating the divine wedding, the marriage of my animus and anima, the union of the opposites at the root of all creation, I am filing for divorce.  The sad monster I’ve sewn together from all my collected failures will finally get to rest, no longer electrified into being by my fears and desires.  If I let him die, something unbuilt will be able to take his place. 

I don’t know what happens next. 

Point of View

It’s spring, officially now, and I notice a lot of my conversations have been about boxes and restrictions.  I understand the importance of structure.  Without structure we would drown in possibility.  Or, as my creative writing teacher pointed out, without restrictions, you have no story.  But I feel the need to stretch, and I’m pressing against the walls to see what they’re made of, and to test if they will still hold me in.

Something to keep in mind in this discussion is turkeys.  Really.  Apparently if you keep a turkey in a cage for a while and then remove that cage, the bird assumes the cage is still there and confines itself to the dimensions of the phantom prison that’s no longer there.  I see my life as a world I created, and my beliefs about what is possible are the arbitrary rules I’ve set up based on my past experience.  I’ve come to see that the walls of my cage are not made of lead, glass or even cardboard.  The box I live in exists only as strokes of imagination, and because life is a work in progress, in this draft I’m writing right now, the shape of that box can be revised.  The deliberate use of imagination is magic of the highest order.  

One of the first signs that there was something terribly wrong with my late husband was when he stopped reading fiction, stopped being able to read fiction.  Biographies, how-to’s, they were all fine, but anything that required him to access his imagination became uninteresting, even irritating.  When he told me this it terrified me.  The cumulative trauma of life’s losses and fears had left Michael trapped in the point of view of someone he’d forgotten he’d created. 

I would rather run headlong into a steel door than argue with stale imagination.  Without dipping the pen of the linear self into the well of the imaginal part of us, stories calcify and are constantly reinforced by a ferocious defensiveness.  The healthy imperative to refresh mutates into mindless replication.  It was not until Michael’s illness progressed and he faced his own death that he was jolted out of his frozen state and could again imagine something more.  He died at home, and after his death, as my teenage son and I sat with his body, Michael’s joy was palpable in the room.  His exhilaration at his freedom reclaimed is a legacy that nourishes us, more valuable than anything he could have owned.  

Do this:  Take a good breath and keep it for a moment, feeling the way the presence of this nectar interacts with any boundaries it comes to, like water looking for a crack or fingers feeling for any opening, no matter how small.  Still keeping that breath, just imagine that there’s more room, following the breath’s lead and feeling into the empty spaces.  Now wait for it; it will come.  With a rush your breath will find its way out of the deception that it is trapped; and your chest, your belly and your lower back will open suddenly to receive more.  Stay there as long as you can. 

There.  You’ve just changed your life.